There’s a lot of great content at this conference, and it’s a bit challenging in some time slots to decide on exactly what I want to see most. However, there are 3 sessions that I will definitely be attending:

Power Query is a cool technology for data transformation – one that I believe (hope) will continue to evolve and become relevant outside of just Excel. And it’s usefulness in quicking mashing up some data inside Excel is outstanding. This is a focused session on the formula language, which I’m interested in, and it’s being delivered by Matt Masson and Theresa Palmer-Boroski. Matt does a great job on these types of presentations. I haven’t seen Theresa present yet, but I’m confident she’ll do a great job, and this will be a good session.

Devin Knight (a co-worker at Pragmatic Works) is delivering this, and he puts together great sessions. Power View is one of those technologies that I don’t spend a lot of time with, but I know I need to know it better, and this session should help with that. Devin has a lot of practical experience with Power View, so this will be a great opportunity to get a real world look at what’s involved.

Hekaton is the new in-memory technology in 2014. It’s primary focus is on improving the performance of OLTP applications, but Todd McDermid will be looking at it from the perspective of delivering analytics. He’ll be answering the question of whether it can be used to deliver a single database that suited for both transactional processing and analytics, and I’m very interested to see the results. I feel like the Hekaton technologies could have a place in the BI world, but I haven’t had a chance to go out and really investigate it myself. Thanks to Todd’s efforts, I won’t have to.

There are a lot of great sessions, and those are just 3 of the ones that appealed to me. I’m really looking forward to attending, and I hope to see you there.